personal in public

I’ve always found stadiums and sports arenas fascinating. Like their sadder, more workweek cousins Convention Centers, stadiums are concrete, generic vessels that come alive when people united by a team or a band stream through their entrances. If sports and music are religion to some, then yes, stadiums are churches, and each person shuffling through the restroom line an individual worshipper.

On a Friday night in early July, I stood on the floor of a stadium in Chicago with tens of thousands of other twirling, wrinkled, middle aged people watching The Grateful Dead reunite after 20 years. The following Friday found me at another massive venue in New Jersey with my 8 year-old daughter to see Taylor Swift perform for squads of tween, teen and other variously aged females, plus a few baffled dads and boyfriends.

These two epic summer musical events in the space of one week smacked me in the face with nostalgia, and filled me with a new parental feeling I’ve been struggling to define. I was buoyed by the primal indulgence of entertainment, and felt unironically #blessed for the dual chances to supersize my and my daughter’s joy.

At the Dead show I was with girlfriends from college, and ran into others from all facets of my life. I was giddy and thrilled to be a part of a temporary hippie throwback moment – no matter how constructed. It was a massive party and I was going for it. My pleasure when the music started was both deeply personal and perfectly public. I was free to dance badly with feeling.

I had last seen The Dead in 1995. What struck me as I watched the band and the fans revel 20 years later is how rarely it is that I lose myself in anything these days – and how much I used to take that kind of letting go for granted. Now my energy seems solely focused on solving problems and creating opportunities for my kids and my work. As the band played, I forgot the checklists and lost myself in singing out lyrics and woo-hooing.

My experience was deepened at the Taylor Swift show, as I witnessed my daughter absorb her first concert. Z’s shiny, widened eyes, her fist raised in the air as she mirrored others around her, the adorable poster she and her best bud schlepped to the show – it was all so beautiful and pure. I breathed it in and put a mental photograph in her girlhood scrapbook for both of us. It made me tear up, because I recognized that Z having a formative experience. I was there for this one, and got to share it with her, but I realized as I watched her mouth move and her eyes follow the spectacle of girl power and pop music, that she was already having the kind of interior life I had reconnected with a week before in Chicago.

As I hugged her and we shouted out the words to “Bad Blood,” “Trouble,” and “Style,” all around me I saw girls and women of all ages doing the same. I saw people, thousands of them, standing in their stadium seats with their blinking bracelets and their smiles, looking as happy to be there as we felt. I squeezed her tighter.

A few days later Z left for overnight camp. It is really weird not having her around, which is a non-writerly way to describe her spotless, empty room and the negative space in our home without her loud voice and big personality, but weird is really what it is. Last week she was here but now she’s somewhere in New Hampshire, climbing ropes and making friends and learning archery, and I’m not there for any of it. She is being propelled into the world, but her inner life will always be with her. I hope she nurtures it with lots of music and art and friendship and anything else that reminds her that she is her own person, with her own story, but is always amongst thousands of others right there with her in the stadium.

dead right

A week ago I was headed to Chicago to see the Grateful Dead. I returned from that experience a different person.

I KNOW. How totally absurd and super annoying of me to say that. Like the person who talks about juicing or their dog’s poops or their baby’s personality a little too much, I realize how self-absorbed and trite this sounds. But allow a sister a little hyperbole.

People have been writing all week about the shows in Chicago and in California, and how the 70,000 + crowds each night were lovely and unified and super kind veggie burrito-ish to each other. No pushing, no aggression, just peace, love and sativa. How the music was rich and potent and how time seemed to hover somewhere between 1995 when the Dead played their last show at Soldier Field, and present day, present moment when they took the stage again with a few tweaks to the band lineup and the appearance of the fans. Walking through the streets of Chicago to and from the show was as cozy, crazy, happy and summertime party-down festive as anything I’ve done in years. It brought me back to college and fun and freedom and nothing left to do but smile smile smile. (Sorry).

It was special to go with two dear friends who live far away but will always be my true sisters. I was without my husband and kids and felt worry free and light. I was utterly in the moment — running into friends, high-fiving strangers, and dancing the hippy dance – the one where you don’t move your feet and might whack someone with your roving arms. I liked having to explain to several people that sorry, I did not have mushrooms to sell, but was grinning and giggling like a maniac simply because I was happy.

Now it’s a week later in the life of a mom of two youngin’s going to two different camps with lunchboxes and lost water bottles and pajama day and doctor’s appointments and playdates and living in the most non-peaceful construction zone of a neighborhood in the world. A lot of things have gone down this week, but I’m still smiling and thinking in these bumper sticker-y Grateful Dead song lyrics. I’m waiting for it to wear off and to return to the pissed off weirdo mom person who yells at people looking at their phones while crossing the street.

I can’t fully explain the transformative effect that one concert had on my attitude, but I am internally vibrating. Something shifted while I was reveling in those songs that were so much a part of my teens and twenties. I was having this intimate relationship with the band as they sang, while around me everyone else was having their own personal experiences – equally as intense of course. I felt like a vessel for the music and for memory and for love.

I try so hard to get there — I meditate, I self-medicate, I try to be mindful towards the happy times and to equally feel the sadness, the anxiety, the anger and the disappointments. But this was a time where everything was working. And the blissful memory of that weekend will sustain me.

It is bizarre, but I’m running with it. If you see me you’ll know. It must have been the roses.

parenthood

The anniversary of my mom’s death is tomorrow. I’m approaching the date with sadness obviously, but nowhere near the numbed out pain I felt saying good-bye 2 years ago. Nor is this moment as hard as waiting for the milestones of that first year to pass.

But I suspect the spring weeks between Mother’s Day – June 6th will always be raw. I will always remember the last time we spoke on the phone, and the stupid cheery orange pashmina I bought her for her birthday on May 24th that I took back several weeks later. The anxious plane ride from NYC to Pittsburgh I took with my younger sister when we knew it was the very end. Celebrating my son’s birthday while sitting shiva.

Though I’m doing fine — trying to be present and feel grateful for my husband and children and other blessings, there is still a major Judi shaped hole in my life. Her loss forced an adjustment and a rebuilding that is ongoing. As Oprah-ish as it sounds, I’ve drawn strength from myself since she died. But erasing her from the picture has had a major impact on how things look and feel in our family.

That context set the stage for my recent epic partaking of “Parenthood.” While recovering from a surgery last month, I surrendered to my bed for a week or so of pure Netflixism. I was secretly thrilled to have the excuse to watch TV all day without feeling guilty – even if I had to sacrifice a body part in order to enjoy that freedom.

I really had no idea of the emotional assault that was “Parenthood,” a familiar seeming primetime NBC drama that looked and smelled like the “Thirty-something” of my youth smushed together with “Friday Night Lights.” Lots of familiar, good-looking television actors and a Bob Dylan theme song to boot. How had I missed this?

Jesus “Parenthood,” you had me at the opening shot of Adam Braverman (NATE FISHER!) taking a jog, and subsequent scenes in the pilot of Max, his son, struggling to be like the other kids while not fitting in at Little League and at school. Duh. I pretty much started crying right there and never once looked back as I went deep into Braverman country.

The show is basically Family Porn. Watching is a form of fantasy, because as difficult the issues they present are (autism, cheating, stay at home dad/mom boredom, black mold, infertility, adoption, PTSD, addiction, cancer, aging parents), everyone faces their problems with so much grace, self-knowledge and skill at solving things in 44 minutes that you can relax and enjoy the emotional ride.

Sure, Sarah is flaky and charming and talks over Adam until Adam reassuringly tells her how it’s going to go down. Crosby is hilarious but screws up again! OMG Julia is so controlling in her pencil skirts. But they talk things out in person and don’t get resentful. They bring each other lattes like that’s a normal thing to do and the lattes don’t get cold in traffic from Berkeley to San Francisco. They get together ALL THE TIME and Camille never seems bitter about all the dishes. The couples have amazing marriages mostly. The siblings don’t seem to judge each other. The children all brush their teeth when asked. Most of the men can fix things (despite the last name they are obviously not Jewish). The women have great hair and nice selections of layered necklaces.

As I obsessively watched the show, condensing 6 seasons into six weeks, it felt like my job. I literally could not stop pressing “Next Episode” and felt like a sneaky junkie at times watching during the day when I should have been doing important things. I cried, on average like 4 times an episode. I laughed when Adam got “The Fever” and felt so frustrated for Kristina because of Max and his Aspberger’s, but was also annoyed that she never seemed to get a babysitter that wasn’t family. I wondered if Kristina was a robot. I wished Mr. Cyr, the high school English teacher had been my boyfriend. I loved the Max/Hank storyline even though it was hard to watch.

Of course I knew it was manipulative to play sad music while someone was going through chemo and I knew it was manipulative to play sad music when someone was being mean to a kid with Asbergers but I cried my heart out anyway. I cried for all of the baseball games my mom wouldn’t attend (not that either of my kids play baseball) and I cried that my relationship with my dad wasn’t as easy as Sarah and Julia’s with Zeek, and that my marriage didn’t feature the same obvious gloss and excellent communication that these couples had.

But I got over it. Because it’s TV and is supposed to elicit these feelings – that’s kind of the whole point. As a viewer you’re supposed to project your deficits onto a fictional family that seriously has it together. It can be cathartic to go on that kind of journey and to binge on something this obvious, but at the end of the day The Bravermans aren’t real and I can’t really hug or squeeze any of them or have them bring me a latte. Whether or not I have similar issues in my own life, they will never be written as concisely or acted as well as these professionals can convey them. The characters can feel real and I can feel connected to their joys and struggles, but at the end of the binge, they are still crafted by a pen and shaped by a director.

I thought I would be devastated when I finished watching last week, but I was satisfied with their treatment of the aging parents storyline and how the finale tied things up with a lovely flash forward montage to a sad song.

No spoilers, but The Bravermans are going to be ok, and so am I. It makes sense why watching this particular show during this period of time felt so compulsively important. I was clearly getting something under my belt before this two-year anniversary tomorrow, trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense once more, processing.

I loved my time with the Bravermans but I’m feeling free now to read books again, do some writing, or hang out with my own perfect/imperfect family.

disneyfied

We just returned from 5 days in Disney World. I did not hate it and I did not love it, but details of the trip will certainly remain seared in my memory for life. Not to be dramatic, but it was one of the most rigorous things we have done as a family to date, which I guess says a lot about how we like to vacation. I think it means we like to relax.

Thinking back on the trip, I visualize undulating seas and lines of people going in and out of focus as I put one foot in front of the other and try to move forward. My path is clogged with epic strollers and adult scooters for those not able to make their way around the park on foot. People are walking with turkey legs in hand. I had heard about this, and now I was seeing it in real life. I recall completely separate stages of the lining up process: 1.) Preparing to get in line based on which lines are shortest, 2.) Lining up to get into the lines, and then 3.) Waiting on the lines. This is after spending quite a bit of money to make sure we were maximizing our time by “fastpassing” and using other special Disney magic™ made possible by VISA/Mastercard/American Express.

At the end of each day, sitting on the crisply made beds of our lovely hotel room (it really was quite pleasant), with our bath towels folded into Mickey shaped heads, the four of us would collapse by 9 pm from the sheer effort of planning, navigating and trying to maximize fun while thousands of others did the same. We thought perhaps because we live in New York and walk a lot and are kind of pushy and can sometimes get a lot done in a day that somehow we would be winning in that environment. Not so much. We were amateurs who did our best and followed a very well researched plan, but still everywhere you looked were people, very nice people who totally meant well, but who nonetheless would beat you down.

However. However. However. The kids had a blast, and there were epic moments while I watched their eyes widen and their smiles “light up” (so Disney of me). The first night we arrived and the four of us went on this Seven Dwarves themed roller coaster at the Magic Kingdom that was just scary enough to excite the little one, but steep enough in the dark to impress the big one. Careening down a hill in the dark that came out into this massive bejeweled room with Dopey, Sneezy, Cranky, et al, our little unit tucked into two tiny cars screaming at the top of our lungs with our arms in the air?! Amazing. It feels pretty great to scream that loud under any circumstances, but knowing your kids are having the same rush you are is doubly cool.

Of course, the fearless 8 year old became obsessed with big crazy roller coasters, which Evan and I had to trade off riding with her. We were both exhilarated and yet nauseated. It ain’t pretty to see a 50ish guy and or 40th gal trying to walk a straight path after being jerked around on Space Mountain or taken upside down on the Aerosmith’s coaster while “Love in an Elevator” blasts. Oy, our inner ears.

The 4 year old, a “sensory seeker” who can get overwhelmed with too much stimulation, had a pretty good time but also had two epic meltdowns when his small purple backpack was taken from him and searched by security guys. On day 4 of the trip, when he was lying on the ground (creepily clean but still) just inside the entrance to Disney’s Hollywood Studios, we all just let him lie there for a while and freak out. And no one around us cared. Not a soul. Because the flip side to how overwhelming it can be to have that many families and people in one place is that no one bats an eyelash when your kid goes loco. No one cares. Disney may be a tad cheesy and maybe people don’t know who Lou Reed and Laurie Andersen are like they all do at Fairway in Redhook, but it is a safe, warm place with kids of all kinds and ages and ZERO JUDGEMENT. And that is a vacation in some ways for sure.

Along those lines, the sharpest contrast between Brooklyn and Disney was that no one I noticed visiting the park was irritated having to wait for any of these things, and most people were overjoyed to be there and to talk to us on the monorail and in the lobby of the hotel and at the restaurants. No one was shouting at each other, no one expected any more then they were getting. No one was pulling rank as far as I could tell. No one was looking around surreptitiously to make sure they were ok, and really no one was looking at their phones every second.

Also, the people who work there are crazy nice. From the moment our feet touched the ground in Orlando, it was all helpful, dutiful, and kind people who talked us through lines and got us from place to place and smiled and helped.

So all that was a truly a break from NYC, where everyone is always on the lookout for the best and things seem to always be at the breaking point much of the time. That can also be very tiring. I think it’s important to step out of whatever grind you live in. It was freeing to go somewhere where no one was concerned how cool something is, and no one talked once about how small batch something is or how they found out about it a year ago before everyone else did. It can really tiring to always have things under the microscope, when almost everyone you know is discerning and ironic and in some kind of way angling for something or another. Ambition is great, and I want to be around smart and sharp people. But its good to have a break for all of that striving. One thing I really realized on this trip how New Yorkers including myself might be a bit addicted to struggle. It makes us feel alive.

And what’s funny? Evan and I were struggling in the Disney environment. It was hard for us to slow down and wait and just be like everyone else waiting in line for Disney crap our kids would soon lose or forget about. How funny is that?

So, my review is mixed. I’m glad Disney happened. Man was it expensive but I learned a lot for the next time, and now my kids will have these memories forever. And yet, I don’t need to go back for a very long time, possibly ever.

Coming back into nasty, cold, harsh and un-customer friendly JFK Airport, the chaos of getting a car service outside the airport, and arriving home to our scaffolding heavy, rutted cobblestone street-ed Brooklyn themed version of Disney, where the boiler had gone out and we all slept together on the pullout couch bed, also felt like an adventure and was weirdly fun. It’s pretty lucky to go away but it’s usually better to come home.

lasts and likes

Yesterday was the last day of second grade. Z’s class watched the Smurfs and Jessie apparently. I know this because after pickup Z and her friend both tried to recount the plot of the Jessie episode and I had to tune them out. Hearing Jessie plots breathlessly rehashed by two seven year olds is actually worse then watching the show itself. But that’s fine. They learned things this year. Just not, you know, in the past two weeks.

So, it’s summer again and the seasons they go round and round, painted ponies and all that. It is pretty easy to get sucked into weeping and feeling panicked that this life is speeding by like one of those TV renovation shows where there’s a dump of a house and then suddenly everyone’s fixing it up in a 2 minute montage and then a backsplash and an accent wall and built ins and books arranged by color all emerge. We don’t see the bathroom breaks and the walks around the block and the lunches and the gossiping about the contractor. We only see the doing, edited down to barely anything.

But life isn’t really that. These milestones, these beginnings and ends, they have this heightened emotional quality, because we try and get a handle on things and highlight them because otherwise, what ARE we doing? Of course, we record them — the end of year performances, the moving up thingies, the last hugs with their teachers with our ubiquitous phones held up in front of us while we half watch the performances, distracted by the idea that we might not get the shot. Because if we don’t record, will we forget? Will we not feel the preciousness of the moment unless other people give us a thumbs up on Facebook? It almost like we think we CAN hold onto any of these fleeting moments if we only record and catalogue and share. Then at least there’s documentation. It’s something.

With all of this mad documenting though, the result can be a racing feeling, an anxious feeling, and sometimes an out of control feeling. It’s almost too much at times. Scary world + innocent kids doing adorable things = please god let this all go well for them. Or something like that – math isn’t really my thing.

What I’ve been doing to counteract my larger existential anxiety when things are moving too fast in this way is to try to stand there in it, in those lumpy throated moments when the kids perform a World Cup dance on a stage and I feel like I simply can’t bear the sweetness and the wonder of this fleeting innocence. Or when they lope around the park after school, I see them from behind scootering away from me and watch their once tiny bodies stretch into tall big kid bodies. I try to just be in it, to just go: wow, they are changing every second and I am changing too. I’m not 22, even though I feel that way sometimes.

Because of course I am older, not because people call me ma’am in American Apparel, but because we are just aging and that’s what we fucking have to do. No one can make it stop, and no one can really take care of us except ourselves. And this past year in particular has held a shift for me, as I truly let go of the need for someone to turn to in that role.

This is sad, but ultimately good. I think maybe I’m a better parent to my kids now that I’ve internalized that control really is an illusion, that I can only do so much, and that luck will play a huge role in all of it. We can only try as hard as we can and love as much as we can and the rest is sort of not even up to us. Being as present as possible seems the only salve for feeling out of control.

Last year at this time, things really were spinning off of their axis. I really did feel like parts of my body were in danger of falling off. I was so tormented about every bit of life moving forward without my mom. Everything felt painful and impossible.

And now I cry a little less easily, and there is an acceptance now that I am the parent – to myself and to these other two people — one of two adults in this house taking care of business. They need me and I need them and this is what this is — all this is. Of course it’s still sad that I don’t have my mom to witness Z’s punk song she performed onstage, or M shuffling down the hall every time he has to pee with his pants around his ankles because he just can’t figure out the order, but it will be ok. And not just because I take the videos and pictures and share them with my friends, but also because these things really happen every minute and I notice them and I feel them and then we move on.

space

There is some. Finally. My heart has been constricted for so long that it feels rather foreign to have air around my thoughts. Grief is a lot of work and takes up a great deal of space. But some has been cleared.

This last month was an emotional sprint towards the one-year anniversary of mom’s death. There were still firsts to get through – Mother’s Day, her birthday, and several memorials. Heading towards this finish — which really isn’t a finish of course, but is more like the beginning of a life without, was quite challenging. May was tough – Mother’s Day in particular was almost physically draining, and I only got through it with wine and yoga and cuddling my family. I was so grateful for the friends who have also lost their mothers, who shared how much they missed them, and how difficult Mother’s Day was for them, too. I felt acutely part of a club, this sad but supportive little club of motherless daughters.

I sat through a memorial that a national women’s organization put together in her honor. Her hometown chapter named a children’s playroom at Family Court for her, because she spent much of the time she was president of this organization advocating for children and families. It was a real honor, but not easy to watch a slideshow set to that inspirational/sad Desiree song – the “you gotta be” one. Mom smiling wide at a podium, marching in protests, and meeting government officials on behalf of this organization – seeing these images of was a reminder of her accomplishments, but also how much she had left to do when she died.

Her birthday on May 24th was another rough one, because I was literally reliving that time last year when she was alive, deteriorating, and yet still able to call me after receiving the peonies and bright orange scarf I sent. It made me sad, thinking about those tokens I now have back in my possession, the scarves, the gifts, the clothes and jewelry divided up. So I took some breaths and wore the orange scarf all that week in her honor.

Then I was back in Pittsburgh for the unveiling, which is done within a year after a Jewish death. It’s a simple ceremony at the gravesite, where a Rabbi says some psalms, the immediate mourners say the Kaddish, or mourning prayer, and the face of the gravestone is revealed. And then there it was. Her name on a piece of granite. Her dates. Mother, Wife, Grandmother and Friend. I placed a purple rock on the top of the gravestone for Miles and Zoe, as Jewish custom dictates. It was a perfect June day, just as her funeral had been almost a year before. The sun and the breeze filtered through the trees as we put arms around each other and cried again for mom. And then we had brunch.

That weekend of the unveiling was intense, but when it was over and we returned home to Brooklyn I felt hugely relieved and … spacious. I felt like I possessed this certain kind of acceptance and understanding that had been out of reach until that moment. It’s vague and new age-y but I felt I had arrived at a destination, in my heart. And that I was going to be okay, no matter what swirled around me from that point on. I hadn’t believed it until then.

I feel so much gratitude towards friends and teachers and people who have been with me throughout this difficult year, bestowing kindness and reading my pieces and making chit chat and asking my how I’m doing. It has all been a part of this particular journey I’m now on, and each interaction and intersection of humanity has been a step on the ladder towards it. I was so happy to be able to honor my mom with friends in my home last week, for the final and most personal of all the memorials, to accept people’s kindness and offerings and music and warmth. We had an unforgettable small service and mini concert for Judi from my friends Jamie and Erin, where I was able to accept love and say thank you to my community. And to let mom go a little bit more, but with the reverence she deserved.

It must be the benefit of all of the therapy, the writing, the going inward and the good support I have. Because I feel so much less angry about losing her than I used to. A huge relief! I feel grateful to the people who get how to be and less pissed at the people who don’t. And I truly feel lucky to be the emotional person I am, and not burdened by it because right now it feels like something of a gift.

I will continue to wrestle with missing her. I will still be sad and have to shake my head at some of the continued fall-out from her loss. But I will be ok. I’m not just repeating it, hoping it will stick. I believe it.

continuum

Terrible stories are everywhere it seems. Stage 4 cancer at age 40, hit by a car while buying cookies at the local bakery, aneurysm on the golf course. Sick kids, sick spouses, sick parents. Mental and physical illness. Accidents.

Last week I received shocking and sad news about a former boss. She died at 45 after being diagnosed with cancer only 3 months prior. I had no idea she was sick. I hadn’t seen her in a very long time, but she had just said something funny on a Facebook post I wrote in February, and I had been thinking about giving her a call. She was a PR maven and since I’m considering strategies to promote my upcoming book, it seemed like a nice symmetry to reconnect with her.

Of course, I now regret terribly waiting on this.

As I’ve grieved for my mom this past year, I’ve noticed a heightened state of nostalgia and an almost maniacal desire to record certain moments in time, to stamp them with recognition so that they never fade. Since Jen’s death last week, I’ve been perseverating over those early years in New York just after graduation, when I worked for her in the publicity department at Hyperion.

Details of the office on Lower 5th Avenue are front of mind. I can see the quality of the fluorescent light in the hallway where the assistants lined up like an entry-level army, fortifying their bosses’ windowed offices. Flicking through the cards on my Rolodex and calling the deli every morning with our breakfast orders. Jen liked a large iced coffee and a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with butter. (This was back when people ate bagels). There was Neil, the super-friendly head of the mailroom pushing the overloaded mail cart, and the giant diamond engagement ring one of the book designers wore. The heft of the To Be Filed File that I hid in my drawer, hoping Jen wouldn’t ask me how the filing was going. The tiny yellow X-acto knife she gave me to open the millions of boxes of books that arrived daily for us to unpack and mail out to the media.

Jen taught me to take a thorough phone message. To create a travel itinerary that wasn’t nonsensical for our touring authors. To grill the “book reviewers” trying to get free review copies. To massage the egos of the needier authors and only get her out of “a meeting” if it was someone specific. She taught me to pitch reporters, the most awkward and agonizing part of publicity work.

Jen gave me amazing opportunities and cocktail party stories for years. We took authors to bookings at the network morning shows, to “Politically Incorrect” when it was on Comedy Central, and to Letterman. She let me take RuPaul on a four-city book tour at age 23, and to a Today Show taping at the MAC store, where I got a makeover and a ton of free makeup. And my favorite, taking authors to the old WNYC, which stoked my longtime love of radio and had the best author and musician sightings in their ratty greenroom.

After work I’d go home. I remember looking around at my neighbors, many older than me, most on a professional track, everyone heading to Central Park to exercise with the fervor they probably put into their jobs – running, biking, rollerblading, unicycling (ok, just this one guy). I was obsessed with people watching and wondering about their back-stories, their paths. If they were coupled, how did they meet their mates? And if they had children, um, how do you even do that in New York? I was fascinated with how one arrives at an adult place and the decisions and luck a person needed to get where they wanted to go. How did they know what they wanted to do and be? How were they brave and strong enough to make it in this crazy ass city?

And now, almost 20 years later, I’m there, firmly ensconced in my adult life. How I arrived here — my own back-story– is nothing special. I’m not always even sure what led to what. I feel super lucky most days, skating by, dealt a few blows here and there, but mostly incredibly grateful. But damn aware of the fragility of it all.

I wish we didn’t need these painful reminders that life is so fleeting and that we need to be good to each other. I guess all we can do to honor those who have passed through our lives is to live with compassion and humor and an incredible amount of humility.

button

She hung her “Judi” key on this hook, lay down in this bed, showered and dried herself with these towels in this bathroom. It’s impossible not to feel her in this place.

Her tics and habits are ground into this apartment, layered like a collage. In this kitchen she insisted on wiping a glass table with a dirty paper towel. At this computer she printed out boarding passes days before she had to. On this beach she devoured her book club books, took walks with her grandchildren and chatted up every yenta from here to Montreal.

Her things are mostly gone from the Florida apartment, parceled out to a daughter or a cousin or thrown away. But a random drawer can still reveal an oversized brown silk button, incased in plastic like a secret. It belonged to a blazer or a sweater that once hung in this closet. A pair of size five flip flops poking out beneath a pile of sand toys, the impression of her bunion-ed feet worn in to the rubber.

Each plastic toy she bought for the kids they loved with a fervor that now seems prescient. The crayon shaped menorah she bought one Hannukah from one of the kosher stores down the street. Sunhats and knickknacks in turquoise, her very favorite color. The “cookies for sale” sign that she and Zoe made the last time we were all here together.

Objects are so curious. Completely static, and yet poignant with meaning. It’s a wonder we’re not all hoarders, trying to hold on to a person.

walk it off

Mom was no good at self-pity. From the time she was diagnosed until the time she died, she faced some overwhelming and deeply frustrating circumstances that most people would not tolerate well, few with the grace she managed. There was the physical discomfort of her illness through all of its soul sucking phases: the itching of her skin, the crappy side effects of each drug and therapy that never seemed to work as the cancer continued to spread. The depression she wouldn’t admit to, and the underlying stress of having a rare chronic disease with no known cure that worsened as it morphed. But though she may have lost a touch of the sunnyness and became perhaps more sarcastic and less patient towards the end, never once did she feel sorry for herself.

When I was growing up, Mom’s and my styles would often clash. I’m a crier, a prober, sometimes a cynic and always an over thinker, and it was challenging to have a mother who didn’t get a lot of that. Things just didn’t affect her emotionally. I’m not saying being who I am always works for me. I have trouble making decisions. I’m sensitive and can take things personally. Mom was the opposite. She would act, feel confident in those actions, and never look back. She had strong convictions, and didn’t second-guess. So she wasted a lot less time dithering and worrying, being anxious. When I reflect on her style of living, doing, and parenting, we are mostly opposites, and it’s even a bit comedic that I would come from her.

But fuck, I’d give anything to be annoyed with her positivity right this minute. To have her tell me to stop complaining about how much I miss her and how hard it is to not her around.

Almost 10 months after her death, there’s this low-grade constant awareness of her lack, and many reminders of how discombobulated things are as my family resets. I get the deep sads more randomly now, but when it comes on, it is still the rawest, achiest, saddest sadness I have ever known. It’s a longing for something I know I won’t get. Out of reach. Off limits. And ugh, I just miss her messages and her texts and her replies and opinions on things so damn much.

I wanted so badly yesterday to send her a picture of Zoe posing in front of the diorama she made as a part of her city planning unit. I want her so much to ichat with Miles while he lounges around our place like a pre-schoolin’ Hugh Heffner in his socks and nothing else. I want to show her the cover of my book or my author photo proofs, just to hear her take on it. I’m dying to talk to her about movies and books. It’s such an uncharted emptiness that I just cannot fill.

I heard this 20ish/30ish girl the other day at the coffee place on the phone. She was talking to her mom in a really sour and insouciant way – she sounded like a teenager with a bad attitude. Who knows what her mom was saying to her on the other line. Who knows their history or their dynamic or what’s come up between them, what their conflicts have been. I’ll never know. But I wanted to shake her. And tell her to buck up. Whatever was going on, she needed to be nice to her mom. It couldn’t be that bad. As Judi would say, walk it off sister.

matryoshka

The grief is morphing. Spreading out. Not lessening exactly, but some of these calcified parts of my heart are opening to something. Softening. I still miss her every hour, every time I strike up a conversation with a stranger or call someone sweetie. Every yoga practice I feel like I’m breathing her in and out. I want to Sykpe with her every time the kids do something Zoe or Mileslike and every time I finish a book or watch a movie or some asshole Republican Senator does something appalling.

But there is a change in the quality of my loss that feels measurable, like the temperature or humidity in a room. Life without her at seven months is still my same life. I think about the same concepts. I loop and worry roughly the same amount that I always have. I find things funny, moving, annoying, fascinating, beautiful, depressing, maybe in that order. Falling asleep and waking up in the morning is easier now. Food is good. And the chaos of the racing mind and impossibly heavy heart I had when she died in June and for that six month period following is dissipating.

Milestones have inevitably come and gone. I went back to my parents’ house for the first time since she died there and began trying to conceive of it as my dad’s place. I sat and drank coffee at the kitchen table and noticed that all of her calendars and date books, reading glasses and theater tickets were no longer a part of the kitchen desk drawer. I tried to get used to not seeing her at her desk in her office or watching Downton Abbey and Scandal on the couch or napping in her room. I had to deal, in such an initial and basic kind of way, with the physical and spiritual changes in my childhood home. I tried out the words: dad’s house.

I went to see her at the cemetery. Weirdly, it was not altogether impactful. Though her final home conceptually, it felt generic being there. Lovely and peaceful, close by where she lived her whole life, but not sad exactly. More vague than anything else. Which has more to do with the I work I need to do in terms of understanding where she is now. Where we all go.

I’ve had to accept how each member of my family is folding her death into their own lives. I’ve come to terms with a change in the narrative: a sad ending to a golden tale of a happy and healthy family doing it right and getting by with luck for so long. What is the next chapter? Knowing is a process, but I’m feeling hopeful.

For my own family of four, they have absorbed much of my pain and allowed me a focus. Lately I’ve been feeling that my mother-ness supercedes my other-ness. It’s the identity that makes me feel most alive and competent right now. Which doesn’t mean that I’m doing it well necessarily. But the way that my kids need me is so primal, so deeply dependent that I feel confusedly comforted by some of the very same tasks that otherwise make me feel like a literal valet/chauffuer/butler.

It must be because I feel so connected to my mom when I’m driving them somewhere, or watching a performance, or researching a camp, or navigating some emotional drama between Zoe and myself or shouting for the eightieth time that Miles must get in the tub. I’m reminded of the beautiful hectic heydey of the Kasdan family and all that we did, and all that mom did for us. It’s a way to bring her in, and to thank her I guess.

My days are getting easier to move through and enjoy even, especially when I’m busy and productive and my household is happy, but its the forever-ness part of this whole business that stings. And answering the questions about the why. That is hard. A spike of pain breaking through the subtle, dull throbbing. When Zoe asks, or I allow myself to ask or just feel sorry for myself because I miss her — when that comes over me, I just let them watch the iPad for hours and just cuddle them and squeeze them and nuzzle their arms and legs and cheeks. It helps.

Lately, Zoe has been sleeping with the Matryoshka doll my mom bought her on a trip to Russia. She holds it tenderly with her orange security blanket, which is funny because the doll is made of wood and is totally not cuddly in any way. This feels symbolic of Judi somehow, she wasn’t cuddly, and she was enigmatic and intricately designed. A multi-layered person within a person within a person within a person, who held my sisters and I inside of her all of her life.

My job now is to embody her, and to never forget the moments and objects and stories and values that made up that life, and to share it.